Quite useful in fact, thank you - this shows that MTN (and likely Vodacom) are using PNI (private hard wired links to Google). We (and most ISPs) peer with Google over NAP and JINX's fabrics (hop 6).. Generally, we're noticing cached content load almost instantly, and uncached content (or anything that relies on Google peering traffic) taking a little longer.
@darrencon you're on a GPON link if I remember, If you don't have IPv6 enabled on your router, please do try enable it (PM me if you need assistance). Let me know if you notice any difference? (v6 traffic is currently being served via our JINX peering for A/B testing).
@ijacobs3 I can assist on trenched but you need a router that supports 6in4 tunnelling (eg. Mikrotik or Ubiquity)
We believe the above might point to a possible issue on the Google's peering side. PNIs get around routing and peering capacity constraints by routing traffic over dedicated interfaces. Google, Netflix, Facebook, Microsoft (and 450+ other networks) peer at NAP. This issue is not generalised to other peers, rather specific to Google, so this points to something more specific, and something we've seen a few times in the past year.
That said, we are reaching out to Google NOC for some feedback, looking at performance differences between NAP and JINX and will investigate this further.